Could the world's mightiest computers be too complicated to use?

THERE are few events in the universe more complex than the violent deaths of massive stars. Their explosions are so huge that they can be seen thousands of light years away, and they leave behind mind-bending remnants like black holes and neutron stars.

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Messer is building simulations for Aurora, due to come online in the early 2020s, which could be the first machine capable of one exaflop – a billion billion “floating point operations” per second – making it millions of times faster than your trusty laptop. Exascale computers will provide unprecedented power, perhaps enough to unlock fundamental goals in a broad range of scientific disciplines. Predicting the weather, simulating entire brains, recreating the cosmos and tailoring drugs to individuals could all become possible. That’s why the US, China and Japan are racing to build one first.

This is a multibillion-dollar development effort, fuelled by the need to power such a beast of a machine without bringing the grid to its knees, and to create a communication network that can coordinate all of its many parts. But lurking in the background is a provocative question with no clear answer: once we build such a machine, how useful will it be?